This weeks guest blog comes courtesy of Richard Milburn (a PhD student in the War Studies department) who tell us about his new sustainable start-up, Tunza Gorilla.
We’ve launched Tunza Gorilla, our ethical fashion brand with a mission to protect gorillas. Tunza means ‘care for’ in Swahili. We want to work with communities to protect gorillas in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
All our clothing is made using 100% Organic Cotton in a factory powered by renewable energy which pays their staff fair wages, and we’re donating 50% of our profits to gorilla conservation charities. We’re reinvesting the rest to help our company grow and achieve our vision of empowering consumers to use the clothes they wear to make a better world.
Gorillas are wonderful, peaceful animals, but are also one of the most endangered species on earth. We’re starting out focusing on the eastern gorilla sub species; there are only 900 mountain gorillas and 2-3,000 eastern lowland gorillas alive today, living in forests in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Surrounding them are thousands of people living in poverty who depend on the forest for their survival; these communities cut down trees for charcoal to cook food and boil water and lay traps to catch bushmeat. Unfortunately, the gorillas sometimes get caught in these traps and their habitat is under threat from deforestation. These communities do not mean any harm, they simply have no other choice because they are so poor.
So both the gorillas and these communities need our help.
Tunza Gorilla Provides the Solution
The idea for Tunza Gorilla came from seeing the plight of the gorillas and the surrounding communities and wanting to help. From studying the issues involved in more detail we realised we needed to find a way to create a large number of jobs for these communities that were connected with conservation. This would lift them out of poverty and help them see the value of gorillas and work to protect them.
At the same time we found there were virtually no products we could buy that protected gorillas. Yet there are thousands, if not millions, of people in the UK and worldwide who love gorillas and want to protect them.
That seemed like the perfect opportunity: to give people living around the gorillas jobs making products for consumers around the world who wanted to protect gorillas. We thought fashion was a great way to do this: we need to improve the ethics of the fashion industry anyway, we wear clothes everyday so they are a necessity and make a statement about who we are, and clothing manufacture is a labour-intensive industry.
As two students with little start-up capital but a massive passion to use business to drive positive social and environmental change, we have a simple mantra: Think Big. Start Small. Act Now.
Think Big: Our aim is to create a fashion brand that employs communities living around the gorillas to make our clothes. This lifts them out of poverty so they no longer need to set traps for bushmeat, which in turn protects gorillas – we call it being ‘eco-man friendly’. And it supports the drive to make ethical and sustainable fashion accessible and affordable to as many people as possible; our basic t-shirts cost just £12.
Start Small: Before we can start to employ these communities, however, we need to establish our brand and prove there is demand for our products.
Act Now: So we’re launching this crowdfunding campaign with our initial range of ethical and sustainable clothing and donating 50% of our profits to gorilla conservation charities. We’re then reinvesting the other 50% back into the company to help us grow.
Our crowdfunding campaign goes live on the Helping B platform – a crowdfunding site dedicated to supporting ethical business – on the 6th October at https://www.helpingb.co/tunza-gorilla-ethical-fashion-brand/. Supporters can pledge support from as little as £1 and help us to launch a company dedicated to making a better world.
See www.tunzagorilla.com for more, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
